ONE DOESN'T SIMPLE RUN AN AGILE PROJECT

September 22, 2016

That is, while there is value in the items on the right, we value the items on the left more

The uncertainty and constant changes make project management greatly complicated. Often, neither the team nor the customer doesn’t know what should be the final product. Initial requirements change in the course of following the new "Wishlist" customer or market changes. In such circumstances, classic project management does not work.

By the way, the "creative" task results are difficult to predict, and the people who work with them, don’t want following the fixed rules. This reduces planning efforts to zero, and the project team leads constantly try “hunting the time”. As a result, customer faces with the bad quality final product.
Agile becomes the answer to this issues. As a usual this methodology used in IT, but nowadays a lot of startups, not IT branch implement it.

12 principles of Agile project management

Customer satisfaction is due to the early and uninterrupted delivery of a valuable product.

Changes in the requirements are welcomed even at the end of the development.

Frequent delivery of working software (every month or week, or more often).

The close, daily meetings of the developers with the customers throughout the project.

Motivated individuals involved in the project. They are provided with the necessary working conditions, support, and trust.

A personal conversation is recommended method of transmission (face to face).

The best mark of the progress is a working product.

The investors, developers, and users should be able to maintain a constant pace indefinitely.

Continuous attention to the technical skill improvement and a convenient design.

Simplicity is the art of not doing unnecessary work.

The best technical requirements, design, and architecture are derived from self-organizing teams.

The constant adaptation to changing circumstances.

Agile Project Management Roles

Various roles such as Scrum Master, the Agile-coach, mentor, Scrum, the Agile consultant, and the Agile project manager often confuse organizations that are moving from the traditional method of Agile software development. Let's take a look at web development process.

Product owner: The person responsible for bridging the gap between the customer, business stakeholders, and the development team. The product owner is an expert on the product and the customer’s needs and priorities. The product owner works with the development team daily to help clarify requirements. The product owner is sometimes called a customer representative.

Stakeholders: Anyone with an interest in the project. Stakeholders are not ultimately responsible for the product, but they provide input and are affected by the project’s outcome. The group of stakeholders is diverse and can include people from different departments, or even different companies.

Scrum master: He does not head and leads the team, you can compare the role of Scrum Master with a good glue holding the team together. In fact, the Scrum Master give the team dynamics without the administrative and management levers. Scrum Master represent the interests of the team and protect them when they need to protect. He should carry out their work so that the team had the opportunity to do what they do best.

Agile mentor: Someone who has experience implementing agile projects and can share that experience with a project team. The agile mentor can provide valuable feedback and advice to new project teams and to project teams that want to perform at a higher level.

Agile project management process

Most projects have stages. Agile projects include seven events for product development. These events are meetings and stages and are described in the following list:

Project planning: Project planning includes creating a product vision statement and a product roadmap, and can take place in as little time as one day.

Release planning: Planning the next set of product features to release and identifying an imminent product launch date around which the team can mobilize. On agile projects, you plan one release at a time.

Sprint: A short cycle of development, in which the team creates potentially shippable product functionality. Sprints can last as little as one day, but should not be longer than four weeks. Sprints should remain the same length throughout the entire projects.

Daily scrum: A 15-minute meeting held each day in a sprint, where development team members state what they completed the day before, what they will complete on the current day, and whether they have any roadblocks.

Sprint review: A meeting at the end of each sprint, introduced by the product owner, where the development team demonstrates the working product functionality it completed during the sprint.

Sprint retrospective: A meeting at the end of each sprint where the scrum team discusses what went well, what could change, and how to make any changes.

In the conclusion, let’s sum up what we’ve got to know about Agile project management methodology.

Agile allows the project team:

quickly and easily respond to any unforeseen changes;

are more likely to get into the customer's need;

to create the more high-quality product through continuous interaction with the customer and the market;

accurately measure the speed of projects and to produce the products in time.